Anyone gotten SL to run with a Radeon IGP

I work away from home a lot, my company laptop has an ATI Radeon IGP 320M graphics card. I am aware that this card is rubbish, but even a very slow SL will be better than no SL.

However what actually happens is avatars and sky render correctly, everything else, land, prims, attachments all become the same uniform shade of pale blue.

The framerate is useable, but you can't see anything.

I've updated my drivers to the latest drivers (Omega 5.6 which are a hacked Catalyst 5.6 that supports the mobile chips) and it made no difference compared to the out of date ones provided with the laptop.

I need my SL fix, weekends-only playing is going to suck

Other relevent specs:
WinXP SP2
AthlonXP 2600+
512MB RAM (of which 64MB is allocated to graphics)

Unfortunately, that might be about as good as you're likely to get. The IGP 300-series is based on the ATI RV100 core, as featureed in the Radeon 7000 video card line, putting it well below the minimum required specs on the ATI site, a Radeon 8500. The RV100/RV150 cores lack a hardware texture & lighting unit, and only feature a single pixel pipeline, which is why the best you're likely to get out of them is what you see now.

In short, they're not supported for a reason. Sorry.

Oh well, I'll have to keep nagging them for that AMD64 + GeForce FX5650 based laptop I've had my eye on.

Is there no way to get this emulated in software? I thought the drivers were supposed to software emulate the missing features, or is that only in OpenGL?

Well, I'm not entirely convinced that it absolutely couldn't ever be done, but I am convinced that it's probably not worth the Lindens' time to bother with getting it to work.

Unfortunately, they have to pick and choose between alienating a few potential customers and not getting to improve SL for the majority. They have to choose what's going to improve SL the most for the most number of people, then focus on that.

This is similar to SL not working on Win9x, MacOSX 10.2, G3 chips, etc. It's not that it couldn't be done, it's that from a "getting the most done" perspective, it's just not worth the redistribution of labour that would be necessary.

Another reason that occasionally comes up: I don't know if you noticed, but SL's performance tends to be pretty sluggish compared to a game like Half-Life as it is. By not investing time to support older and lower-capacity hardware, SL may run on a smaller number of systems, but it tends to run better. It may be callous, but "You can't use SL because your computer sucks, sorry" is probably a lot better for Linden's marketing efforts than a client that maxes out at 0.3FPS.

I was actually referring to the driver should emulate the features that aren't supported by the hardware, not that LL should do something about it.

I thought the whole point of DirectX was that on any hardware a game could make one single API call and get the same result, thus eliminating the old DOS days where games had to support 10 different soundcards and a handful of graphics cards if you wanted SVGA.

On my linux box, if I shove in a graphics card with no 3D support, OpenGL is entirely software based. Windows appears to do similar with Open GL and has done for a long time, I was just suprised to find this isn't the case with DirectX.

Every game I've tried to run on this laptop has worked, many of them run like a bag of crap, but they display correctly. Disclaimer: I haven't tried Doom3

Does the Mac SL client use OpenGL? Is there any option in the windows client to use OpenGL, that would be an easy workaround and it would also make running it under wine on linux a lot easier.

I did actually have it working on that chipset on a compaq presario 2131ea which has a xp2000+ and 512mb ram, but the speed was verrrrrry slow and yes you get the warning it thinks its a 7000 card, i think the fps were about 4 with the settings at minimum.

4fps would do. What steps did you take to get it working? any specific OS and driver combinations?

I only get 6fps on my GF4 Ti4200 (probably due to CPU limitations) so I shouldn't notice too much problem. It's better than no SL at all whilst on the road during the week.

I've only been playing since mid last week when I had time off and getting withdrawal symptons already.

The laptop is running windows xp home with sp2 totally upto date with patches etc from microsoft, the video drivers were the latest from compaq, which were a year old, i did try the omega drivers which worked except they didnt displays the textures on objects so i reverted back to the compaq ati drivers which was version

Version: 8.003.3-040515a-016016C

So i can only suggest really have a look around the support area of the laptop makers site for drivers, perhaps try looking at other models that had the same chipset.

The laptop is made by some no-name chinese company with no support section on their site. It's sold by a company in the UK that is renowned for being shit (I had to reconstuct half the drivers by extracting them from the password protected ghost image that makes up their restore CD.

Do you have a link to the Compaq drivers? I'll try them instead.

and is yours definately an IGP 320M, not the 340?

Yes definately 320M

Heres a link for 7.96
ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softlib/software3/COL3046/hb-18926-1/SP27431.exe

and 8.003

ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softlib/software3/COL3046/hb-21505-1/SP27665.exe

There are more available for my laptop on this page

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/previousVersions?dlc=en&tool=softwareCategory&lc=en&os=228&product=315431&cc=us&softwareitem=hb-21505-1#

I Really have no idea how good these will work if at all.